Thank you, Chair.
I want to thank the witnesses for coming today, the National Council of Women; CASA, which has been busy on the Hill this week meeting with people from all parties on student issues; and Rob, for doing the great work he does.
Rob, as you know, we tabled yesterday our committee report on poverty, a report in which you played a big part. So we thank you for that.
We brought this motion forward to have a bit of a study on the implications of the long-form census no longer being mandatory. The specific purpose of this committee is to have a look at the impacts of this on those who are the least advantaged in society: the poor. They quite often tend to be people with disabilities. Quite often they are women who are in unpaid or low-paid work.
It's an important topic, because as all three of you have indicated, this is going to have ramifications for years to come for the services the government is going to be able to provide and the information government will have in providing that service.
On education, for example, you referred to the YIT survey, youth in transition, but we've also had the cancellation in recent years of both the Canadian Council on Learning and the Canada Millennium Scholarship Foundation, both of which did significant amounts of research on education issues.
As you said, Canada doesn't have very good surveillance of education information versus other countries. The main information sources we have are now gone.
On the disability side, the disability community lost the PAL survey, a particularly important survey for many people in the disability community, and it hasn't yet been replaced.
So it is important for people to understand that on the long-form census, the Governor of the Bank of Canada has a point of view, as does the Canadian Chamber of Commerce. All have a point of view on this. In fact, one of the most telling articles all summer was an opinion piece in The Globe and Mail that listed the three lonely organizations that support the government's decision against the churches, the business organizations, the social agencies, the provinces, the cities, the communities, and the distinguished Canadians who have decried this decision.
Canadians didn't understand it, and they thought it was just policy. Then we found out that in fact the government knew that information would be lost. In fact, The Globe and Mail cited at the end of September an internal order from Statistics Canada that states: “It is recognized that the quality of the data collected by the voluntary [survey] will be lower than that of a mandatory survey”. It goes on to say that some survey data “will not be useable for a range of objectives for which the census information would be needed”.
The government knew what they were doing with the cancellation of the long-form census, and it follows a pattern. That is the concern. This is going to hurt people who are already the most marginalized in Canada.
My question is for Rob.
We agree with you, obviously, that there shouldn't be jail time for people who don't fill out the census. We've said that from the beginning. That's been a false argument the government has used. I'd like you, if you could, to give me a specific example of Canadians who will be hurt by this decision if it goes forward, as apparently it will.